Is it simply that the public gives more latitude to a performer than to a president? That's certainly part of it. Johnny Cash capitalized on the look and the sound of a sinner, the strummin' and growlin' of the penitent in pain. George W. shaped up before he came to the public stage and entered a political arena that, particularly after the Clinton years, requires at least the appearance of moral rectitude.
But something else is at work here. In the vicious polarities of current political controversies, nothing is off limits to sneering scorn, not even a man's religion.
Al Franken, who describes himself (with deliberate irony) as "fair and balanced," is typical of the liberal enemies of George W. Bush, who readily question what's in the president's heart.
"I really can't tell you - but I'm suspicious (of his religiosity)," he tells Beliefnet.com Editor Steven Waldman. "I'm very suspicious of the way he uses it. I'm suspicious that it's done for political purposes and that he really isn't as religious as he makes out to be. But he might be. I really don't know."
Of course he doesn't know. But that doesn't stop him from opening his book with mockery, because, as he puts it, God is "pissed off at Bush, whose friends have been going around saying he felt he was chosen at this time to lead the nation, presumably by God."
This is nonsense and Al Franken knows it. He calls on a prejudice articulated by Stephen Carter a decade ago in his book, "The Culture of Disbelief," describing how religious faith has been demonized and trivialized in public life. (Jimmy Carter, a liberal-enough Democrat, was similarly ridiculed.) "People who take their religion seriously," writes Carter, "who rely on their understanding of God for motive force in their public and political personalities, well, they're scary people."
Liberals and conservatives once valued public law as having its foundation in religious law, what Martin Luther King meant when he said, "A just law is a manmade code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God."
It was a commonplace for politicians and presidents to speak of religious faith as underwriting public trust. The public was reassured by it.
Billy Graham advised Johnny Cash to put his "heart and soul" into his work, literally, and he did. A more generous-hearted public would appreciate no less from a president.